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Wednesday, 28 November 2012

Staff Picks - Best Books of 2012: Jane

The Street Sweeper– Elliot Perlman

Elliot Perlman’s third novel comes eight years after his last novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity,
and is dedicated to the victims of racism, named individuals ''who died
from manifestations of the same disease.'' The worlds surrounding two
men and their families swirl in and out of history as the forces of the
Holocaust, the American civil rights movement, Chicago unions, and New
York City racial politics combine in a thrilling cross-generational
literary symphony. Despite describing some of the worst horrors of the
20th century, it ends unapologetically happily as ''a young
African-American oncologist and a white Jewish historian stood smiling
and talking to a skinny black street sweeper''.

The Chemistry of Tears– Peter CareyIn Peter Carey’s 12th novel, much depends on two voices. The first belongs to Catherine Gehrig, an horologist working at the(fictional)
Swinburne Museum in London, who has recently lost of her lover. The
notebooks she receives introduce us to the novel’s second voice, that of
a wealthy mid-19th-century Englishman, Henry Brandling. Henry pursues a
beautiful invention, to heal his sick son; Catherine reassembles the
mechanical swan as a means of balancing her grief. Carey manages these
time-shifts with ease. The themes turn out not simply to concern the
beauty of science, but the ways in which science and humans interact and
overlap. Specifically, it is a vision of how to discover order in a
random universe, the illusory versus the actual, the mechanical versus
the organic. And it turns out that the most tremendous of all MysteriumTremendums
- overwhelming mysteries - is the body, which operates according to
specific laws ("the chemistry of tears"). The gap between that which
imitates life and that, which is living, is something that isn’t simply
part of the works. A soul!

A Perfectly Good Man- Patrick Gale Gale’s latest novel was conceived as a companion piece to his earlier book Notes on an Exhibition. The central idea of that book was of the difficulty in growing up with a mother who was a mad genius, and in A Perfectly Good Man
the madness is on the father’s side. Barnaby Johnson, the central
character, is not just a priest; he is a man who has devoted his life to
being as good as he possibly can and inevitably that flows over onto
his wife and children.

It’s
a kind of moral thriller. At the beginning of the novel when Barnaby
prays for the dying Lenny’s soul instead of calling an ambulance, it
leads to his having to justify his actions as well as the power of
prayer at the inquest, which shows bravery in an age where priests are
considered as mere social workers. But Barnaby stands up for what it’s
really about.

On
another level it’s also a thriller because of a frightening stalker,
Modest Carlsson who seems to be excited by death and whose main aim in
life is to destroy the “good” Barnaby. He is a character who doesn’t
realise how his actions affect others. The plot moves in two directions
at once spiralling backwards into Barnaby’s roots and troubled teens and
childhood to find out what the answer to his need to be “good” might be
and each chapter to feel as contained as a short story. In the end the
novel is about much more than religion. It’s really about family as most
of Gale’s books are, and about the dynamics of the family.